Death Note Vol. 8, by Tsugumi Ohba

Nrrrrrrt.

That's about the only sound I was capable of making after this book EXPLODED MY BRAIN. If you've read any of my other Death Note reviews, you're going to be like, "Yeah, yeah, I get it with the brain explosion, get a new phrase, lady." But I can't. Because my brain has exploded. Again.

Okay, so. Light's sister has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers, led by a chocolate-loving mini-L want the notebook in trade. Light comes up with a plan to not do that last part, but the kidnappers are way wily-er and they temporarily hijack a plane and take Light's dad out to the desert where they're keeping his daughter underground in some crazy revolving door trap and there's no choice but to give up the notebook and now the kidnappers are like, sweet, and go killing all the people they don't like.

But of course there's still another notebook, and a person who can see people's names to write them down in it, and so Misa is still useful and Light still hangs out with her, even if her sexy underpants do absolutely nothing for him. Poor Misa.

AND Light is working with the American special ops team headed by the other mini-L, who at first acts like he's never heard of the first mini-L and then is like, "Oh, no, I totes know him. And must defeat him."

Oh, also, there's a third Shinigami who apparently owns one of these notebooks? I don't remember this from the previous books but I remember so little that I will go ahead and believe it, and he totally messes everything up.

And then a bunch of people die, and then Light contemplates killing, like, everyone else, including Misa. Because that's what you do to the people who love you, right?

This is all very confusing, I'm sure, because the book is super confusing, and there are still like five books to go and I might suffer a mental breakdown before I finish them. But I still want to finish them. There is something very wrong with me.

Recommendation: Probably you should NEVER read this series, because you're just going to get sucked in and your brain is going to explode and you're going to think it's a good idea to keep reading them. But still, you should read them.

Rating: 7/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Dark and Hollow Places, by Carrie Ryan

I just... I... hmmph. Pout. Frustrated dance. Etcetera.

I shouldn't have picked up this book. I really shouldn't have. I quite liked The Forest of Hands and Teeth, but I did not like The Dead-Tossed Waves, and I knew that I was not going to like this book but I had to give it a chance, right? And when I saw the audiobook sitting on the shelf, just waiting there for me, knowing that I lots of time for listening to audiobooks at work... well, I couldn't resist.

True story: I listened to probably the first three or four hours of this book before realizing that it wasn't still about Gabry of the previous installment. I was very very confused and wondering how I had managed to forget all this stuff that must have happened, and then finally I figured out that it's actually from the point of view of Gabry's sister, Annah. So I gave up and started over, and things made so much more sense then. Well, comparatively.

Right, so, Annah. She's living in the Dark City (no, really), and she's been waiting for her boy-thing to return from the army-type-thing for several years now, but with all the zombies and the really crappy living conditions she's like, okay, fine, I'm out of here. Except then she sees herself, and by herself I mean her twin sister, and she's like, oh, how interesting, considering the last time I saw her I was leaving her to her doom in the woods. And so she heads back into the city to find her sister and, you know, catch up.

But, if you've read the other novels, you know that Gabry doesn't remember a thing about Annah, and also she's trying to run from some zombies and army-type people herself, oh, and also, she's madly in love with Annah's boy-thing. And he's pretty in love with her, too.

And so there is love triangle-age, no, love square-age because another fella is there who was once in love with Gabry and who is now thinking about being in love with Annah, like, seriously? And there is also danger because said fella has this immunity thing to the zombie-ism and the army wants him. And then they get him, and also the other boy fella and also the twins and they aren't very nice and they show Annah that the world has really gone all to crap and so isn't it okay if they leer at her and abuse her? Of course it is.

It's... uncomfortable.

So, yeah. The book doesn't have much of a discernible plot, that I could tell, unless you count making me hate Annah so hard as a plot — if I have to hear one more time about how no one loves her or how her scars make her unlovable or how she uses her hair as a shield or how she once associated a certain affectation with her old boy-thing but now it's totally her new boy-thing's affectation, I may scream a little. I did actually say "I KNOW." out loud a couple of times, at my desk, while listening to this. Frustrating.

I'm not sure how this series went so off the rails (in my opinion, as I've seen many people loving on this book) after this first book — I think part of it is that the protagonists have gotten progressively weaker, and also the fact that the love parallelapiped has gotten progressively more important to the story. Whatever it is, I'm giving this book a solid MEH.

Recommendation: I guess if you're looking for a love story with zombies, you could read the last two books of this series.

Rating: 3/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Anya's Ghost, by Vera Brosgol

I heard about this book over at the NPR a couple weeks ago, which makes this an incredibly fast turnaround, for me, for hearing about, ordering up, and reading a book!

It almost didn't happen, though. The first few pages of this graphic novel are all, "Wah, wah, I'm an immigrant child and I don't wanna be, I wanna be AMERICAN and get skinny by eating LOW FAT POP TARTS and I have crush on a guy with a GIRLFRIEND and I get so little allowance I can only buy ONE pack of cigarettes a month, wah wah," and then Anya falls down an abandoned well and I am like HAH YOU DESERVE IT THE END. And I closed the book, and was like, well, there's that then, but then I was like okay, fine, I'll stick around at least 'til the ghost. And then I didn't stop reading.

So, yes, there's all the immigrant stuff, which is rather like the other First Second book I read, American Born Chinese, and really, I shouldn't have doubted, because also like that book Anya gets hers for all the whining and becomes a much better person by the end. Spoilers? Probably not.

What happens is, she falls down this well and finds a skeleton and then finds a ghost, who is all, "I've been trapped down here for 90 years and really, couldn't you help me see the world a bit?" at first, and becomes very slowly more creepy and then menacing and the art is wonderful because you can literally see this change happening. And, as in all good horror stories, the creepy and menacing parts of the ghost are really just exaggerations of Anya's own life and potential future.

And even if you're not into finding-yourself stories or ghosts or whatnot, there's plenty of horrible high school stuff you can look nostalgically back on, like tests you haven't studied for and showing your British-style pants in gym class and finding out that the hot guy at school is a total loser, actually, and did I say nostalgically? I meant HOLY HECK AM I GLAD I AM NOT IN HIGH SCHOOL ANYMORE.

Recommendation: Right, so, yes. Give this one a chance!

Rating: 9/10

Death Note Vol. 7, by Tsugumi Ohba

Hey there, Death Note! How have you beeeeeen for the last seven months? Good? Good!

So when last we left off... um... stuff was happening. There was this notebook, and you could write people's names in it and they would totally die, and that was kind of interesting, and then this kid with God-aspirations was like, "I'm'a totally kill all the bad guys in the world" and that was pretty awesome except that there are, like, laws and stuff and so the police decided to go after God-kid, who happens to be the son of the police chief guy, which is all complicated, and then God-kid started having to kill some good guys, which is terrible, and then God-kid made with the crazy-ass LOGIC and PSYCHOLOGY and managed to escape the police largely by forgetting that he ever had this mysterious notebook in the first place.

Yes. That. That's totally what happened.

And I don't recommend forgetting all of that yourself before reading this seventh volume, because right from the start the writers are like, lets have some weird stuff happen that makes no sense but we'll explain it later! Which is good, except when I don't realize that I shouldn't already know what's going on and sit there with a confused look on my face instead of reading the five pages I need to get to the part with the explaining. Not that the explaining is very explainful. I'm still confused.

'Cause basically, in this one, God-kid, aka Light, remembers that he had the Death Note thing, and it turns out that he totally planned to remember this and that he's got some crazy logic/psychology plan to get his Death Note back without getting caught as the killer, and also to kill anyone who might ruin said plan. And it's brain-hurty but also awesome, and it mostly works, except that the killing-people part only encourages NEW people to come out of the woodwork to track Light down, like I didn't already have enough characters to keep straight. Which I did.

Luckily, I have the next two book in my possession now, so I might actually get around to reading them in a timely manner!

Recommendation: Oh, you should totally read this series (if you don't mind things that make your brain explode), but you should probably start back at the beginning. :)

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge, Global Reading Challenge: Asia)

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Soooooo remember when I read The Hunger Games and I liked it and then I read the sequels and I did not like them? If you did, you're better than me, because I totally forgot the first part of that. And so when my book group decided to read The Hunger Games I was like, uggggggggggggggggggggh I don't wanna.

And so I sat down and I started reading it, and then I got distracted by other books, and then I decided to just power through it and oh, right, I forgot that this one is actually pretty darn good and so I stayed up until midnight (horrors!) reading it.

In case you also have forgotten this book in the wake of its sequels, the premise is awesome: dystopian future, The Man (well, The Capitol) keeping his subjects down, said subjects unable to rally against The Capitol because they are instead pitted against each other in a yearly deathmatch using children and sadly not claymation. Oh, devious, Capitol. Delightfully evil. Well done.

My favorite parts of this book take place in the arena. Kids killing kids, kids allying with kids who are going to kill them later, kids making up temporary ethics in order to have some semblance of humanity in the midst of all the killing. Watching Katniss devise plans is awesome; watching her carry them out is even more awesome.

The rest? Eh. I had a lot of problems with this book last time I read it because of the love story, which still stinks, and the handful of things that seem super important at the beginning but seem to be forgotten by the end, which still exist and still irk but after reading the whole series I know which ones to just flat-out ignore. I actually got through a lot of the crappier parts of the book that way this time, just remembering that they weren't really important and thus not worrying about them. I highly recommend this course of action.

Another plus side to the re-read is that I could stop being frustrated that Collins chose to create a love story that I find both implausible and annoying and instead just read her story as written. I still found myself rolling my eyes at many turns, but I could appreciate better the interactions and emotions that Collins created. I'm going to maintain my allegiance to Team Katniss Should Grow A Pair, but I guess I can hang out with the other teams if they're having a party or something.

Recommendation: If you like a good (bad?) dystopian future and some excellent fighting and logic-using, you should read this book. Just this one.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor

A couple weeks ago, when I had run out of audiobooks to listen to at work (and just one day before a bunch of audiobooks I'd put on hold came in, of course!), I made an emergency trip to the library with my husband to find something to fill my time. I had no idea of what I wanted, so I just told Scott to grab the first thing that looked interesting. It was this, and I must say that Scott chooses very well!

Well, maybe. I adored this book, but from what the internets have told me, this is the kind of book that you're going to love or loathe, so be prepared!

What this is is a retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which I also liked quite a lot, largely because of Michael York. You know how it goes. Anyway, in Beddor's version, Alice is not just the overactively imagination-ed daughter of a friend of Charles Dodgson, but also Alyss Heart, Princess of Wonderland. After her not very nice aunt, Redd, comes out of exile, has Alyss's parents beheaded, and takes over Wonderland, Alyss is secretly shepherded out of Wonderland by Hatter Madigan, a Heart bodyguard and elite fighter. She ends up in late 19th-century London, where her story is mangled by Dodgson, and since no one believes her anyway she decides to forget all about having been a princess once. As these things go, of course, once she's grown up and about to be married, her wedding is crashed and she ends up back in Wonderland, where she has to fight Redd and try to win back the kingdom.

Or, to be brief, what this is is Alice with more action sequences.

And I liked it a lot. I'm always a fan of this kind of "true story" of a popular story, and I think Beddor does it quite well. Some of the conceits are a bit of a stretch (Dodgson inventing the White Rabbit from an anagrammatical counterpart, Bibwit Hare? Alyss and a boy being in love-ish at the age of, like, seven?), but for the most part I was totally on board with Beddor's world. I've seen some complaints about the writing, but I wasn't distracted by any of it while I was listening to this at work, so it can't be that terrible. If I ever get through all of the audiobooks that have subsequently arrived for me, I'm sure I will be dipping back into this series.

Recommendation: For readers of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland who thought, "Not enough heads are coming off, here."

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, by John Grisham

I... ugh. I don't usually regret reading books, but this one? This one I do. I have never read a John Grisham novel, so I don't know how this compares, but on its own? It's not good.

So why did I listen to it? Well, I've got five hours of tedious work everyday that is made better by the presence of audiobooks and podcasts. And I was out of podcasts. And audiobooks. And I knew that a friend had read and at least moderately liked this, so I figured it would be okay.

Well, I guess it had its okay moments. Let me think of them. ... Um. ...

Okay, let me take a different tack. Here's why it should have been good: I adore Veronica Mars, which is about a high-schooler that kicks some butt in the private investigation department. Theodore Boone is about a middle-schooler who kicks some butt in the law department, and throughout the book I felt a distinct VM vibe from the story, with fellow students and even adults coming to Theodore with their problems and Theo solving them right quick.

But it turns out that the conceit doesn't actually carry over very well. For starters, I'm pretty sure it's not completely illegal to practice private investigation without a license, and even when it is, the nature of being a PI lends itself to a little rule-breaking. Theo Boone apparently thinks it is totally okay to practice law without a license as long as he doesn't charge for it (very very wrong), and when he's all hacking into computer systems and lying to school staff and whatnot I am like, "ARE YOU SURE IT IS A LAWYER YOU ARE TRYING TO BE." I know lawyers are not all fine upstanding citizens, but the ones in Grisham's novel here at least try to be, so all of this shenaniganizing kills me.

Other things I did not like: the central bit of the story is this big murder trial, and the prosecution has absolutely no case but everyone thinks the guy is guilty anyway but it doesn't matter because reasonable doubt blah blah blah. And a convenient way for the guy to be convicted would be for a surprise witness to show up, like they do on TV. So when several characters informed me that a surprise witness NEVER happens because it is NOT ALLOWED... I figured there was going to be a surprise witness. And (spoiler!) there is, and he blurts his whole story to Theo (OF COURSE), and much of the book has Theo dithering about whether and how to get this dude into the trial.

And it's just so... tiresome. I didn't really care whether this guy's testimony could or would be used, and I really didn't care about the seventy million other legal troubles Theo helped in, but I was curious to see how it would all turn out and then the ending just does something else entirely!

On the plus side? It's not Castle.

Recommendation: I think that if you are more willing than I am to suspend your disbelief and/or you are a precocious 7-year-old who thinks that law is pretty neat and wants to read books about kids and law, you will like this book.

Rating: 2/10
(A to Z Challenge)

13 Little Blue Envelopes, by Maureen Johnson

This isn't technically my first e-book, since I've read two Cory Doctorow novels and Dracula on my computer, but it is the first e-book I've read portably, in this case using the Kindle app for my Android phone. I had originally downloaded the app to try to read Pride and Prejudice, but gave up on that for the audiobook version, and the poor app was destined to languish along with Angry Birds and Words with Friends.

BUT THEN! Maureen Johnson, whom I dedicatedly follow on the Twitters, decided to offer up 13 Little Blue Envelopes for FREE in advance of the publication of the sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope. And while I am in love with Twitter Maureen, I have managed to read but one of her books proper, and so this situation presented itself as a win for everyone. It can even still be a win for you, as the book is still free for a few days yet, with all the pertinent links over at Maureen's blog.

So first a note on the e-book format itself: it being on my phone, the book necessarily looked a little odd, what with sentences not fitting perfectly on short little lines and some formatting causing odd little line breaks here and there. And indeed, I felt a little lost without page numbers or an idea of the heft of the book. But I had an eye appointment right after work last week and got there, as usual, embarrassingly early, and so I pulled out my phone and started reading. I felt like Reed on Criminal Minds, "turning" pages at an alarming speed but still managing to understand them (if only I could do that for regular-sized books!), and though I was surprised by a chapter break here and there it still felt like reading a paper book. It being my phone, I wouldn't want to read a large book in one go on it for fear of going blind by backlight, but it was perfect for the waiting room and for the times I was standing in line or otherwise bored.

And now for the story: It was okay. It, like its format, was perfect for the waiting room or standing in line et cetera, but I had some problems with it.

The driving force behind the story is the eponymous set of envelopes, which are left to our hero Ginny by her dead aunt who was a bit flighty in life. Her aunt, Peg, wants Ginny to go wander around Europe, following the path that Peg took after she left the States.

This seems pretty cool, except that the letters are constantly telling Ginny to go here or there IMMEDIATELY DO NOT PASS GO DO NOT GIVE YOURSELF A CHANCE TO DO WHAT YOU WANT and Ginny, being that sort of person, obliges without question. This makes me hate Ginny a bit, and it makes me hate Peg more considering that she herself did whatever she wanted. And as a consequence of Ginny up and leaving for somewhere new every ten seconds, the book felt quite rushed and unfinished and I just wanted it to slow the heck down and let me figure out what was going on HERE before I had to go THERE. And so there is that.

But! For all the rushing around, I was still quite engaged in the story; I wanted to know where Ginny would go next and what she would learn and who she would meet and if she'd ever get back to the cute guy from the beginning of her adventures. And although Maureen Johnson does not quite write the way she tweets (for then her stories would go on for ages), I am still drawn in by her turns of phrase. And and, I love the way that she describes all of the weird things that go on in foreign countries, like washing machines in kitchens and oddly labeled bathrooms and other things that you don't really think about until they're staring you in the face.

So, on the whole, I do not regret the time I've spent with this book. The free version comes with a preview of the sequel, which preview I read and which did not really entice me to put the book on hold. But I am excited for Maureen's upcoming Jack the Ripper mystery series, which seems slightly more up my alley.

Recommendation: For YA fans who like a good road-trip story or a good jaunt about Europe.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Search for WondLa, by Tony DiTerlizzi

My main reaction to this book is this: WHAT.

I picked it up knowing absolutely nothing about it except that it had a neat cover and a strange title. The "jacket" copy (I grabbed the audio version) was interesting enough, with its promises of a kid living underground and busting out and discovering new and interesting things, that I figured I could give it a listen at work. So onto my iPod it went.

Listening to it, though... eh. I missed the part on the box where it said that Teri Hatcher was narrating, and that was a pleasant surprise at first, since I do love Hatcher's voice. But I quickly discovered that I do not like Teri Hatcher's robot voice, or her "Dory speaking whale" voice (from Finding Nemo, of course, and which Hatcher uses for a different, alien large animal) or, in fact, her teenage girl voice, which is possibly more that I hate teenage voices and inflections in general, see that link above. Uggggggggh.

So the story, then. There is a teenage girl — well, a twelve-year-old, so almost teenage — called Eva Nine (another narrating beef: Hatcher can't decide if it's pronounced eh-va, ee-va, or ay-va), who lives underground with her robot MUTHR, who is, obviously, her robot mother. It's just the two of them, and they're training Eva to go wander around Earth, or something, I'm not quite clear on this, but the training gets interrupted when a Bad Guy comes and burns up their hidey-hole. Eva runs off, then gets captured by the Bad Guy, then escapes with a couple of friend-types who are decidedly not human, then goes back to rescue MUTHR, then decides to figure out why she is not on Earth with the humans, and then there is more travelling and adventuring and oh, the title comes from some picture that Eva finds that has just the letters WondLa visible around the picture. Uh. Huh.

I guess this is a children's book, though I found it in the YA section (I imagine it's for older kids, younger teens), and so I guess I can forgive a lot of the telegraphed information and things that seem obvious to me but come as a "surprise" at the end. And one of the things that I absolutely did not see coming actually makes the book make a whole lot more sense, and makes it possibly better, and I wish I had figured it out sooner so I could have appreciated it while it was happening. But I had a lot of nitpicky problems with the story; I wondered how DiTerlizzi's version of a Babel Fish actually works or why the Bad Guy shows up in the first place or why certain things that seemed incredibly important got completely ignored for the rest of the book.

Oh, and then at the end something completely out of left field happens so that I will read the sequel. Not gonna happen.

I don't think I would read this book again, but if I were going to go back in time and pick this book up for the first time again, I would make sure it was in book form, as apparently there are neat illustrations and, of course, I wouldn't have to listen to the voices I disliked. And there's an interesting thing that I didn't check out because I didn't want to download something, but if you are reading this with kids they'll probably download it before you even realize — on the CDs and, I imagine, in the book are some illustrations that you can hold up to a webcam and that the aforementioned downloadable program will apparently decode and turn into some sort of interactive image or video or something? If you end up doing this, let me know what it is!

Recommendation: I think kids will like this; I think I would have liked it better as a kid, at least. I imagine that if you like DiTerlizzi's other stuff, this is probably right up that alley.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Ring of Solomon, by Jonathan Stroud

Okay, so, we've already established that I heart Bartimaeus. I find him delightful and wonderful and lovely and all sorts of other good adjectives. But it turns out that I like him a heck of a lot more when compared to lesser beings rather than when he's just being awesome all the time. It's kind of like how you can't wait for summer to come and be warm all the time, until summer gets there and you're sweltering and envisioning snowball fights.

So, yeah. This is, I guess, the fourth Bartimaeus book, though it's not directly related to the other three except for its protagonist. This one takes place in the time of Solomon, who is the boss of a magician who is the boss of Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is all collecting ice and stuff until such point as he meets a wannabe assassin called Asmira, whom he rescues and convinces to convince his boss to free him. Well, the boss "frees" him into a bottle where he's meant to stay trapped, but then Asmira summons him up all magician-like and then instead of letting him be free she coerces him to help her kill Solomon.

The plot is definitely excellent, with the intrigue and the subterfuge and the awesome. But while I enjoyed Bartimaeus and his trickery, I couldn't have cared less about Asmira, who is quite possibly dumber than Nathaniel and not nearly as entertaining when bad things happen to her, because who cares?

On the plus side, I'm still also in heart with the narrator, Simon Jones, and his soothing voice got me through several hours of stickers and data entry. So... yeah. It's a fun read, even if you haven't read the other books, but I wouldn't say it's as good as the trilogy proper. So go read that instead.

Recommendation: For fans of fantastical swashbuckling, and of Bartimaeus.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, What's in a Name Challenge)

Ptolemy's Gate, by Jonathan Stroud

Eep! Oh, hey again, Bartimaeus, back so soon? I suppose that's what happens when your story is so good...

Soooooo in this book, we've popped forward in time a bit again. Nathaniel is as insufferable as ever, Bartimaeus is sick of suffering him, and Kitty is a burgeoning magician. Wait, what? Yeah.

Story-wise... hold on, I'm going to have to look this up. Doo doo doo. Oh. Right. Okay, so there's a war on in America, and Nathaniel is the new minister in charge of making up stuff that gets people to sign on to fight in the war. That's a fun job. But of course, people aren't happy and there's civil unrest and whatnot. Also, more non-magic types are discovering a resistance to magic that lets them escape demons unharmed or see them even while they're disguised. Not terribly useful for the magicians. Also, Nathaniel is alerted to the suspicious actions of some lower-level government types and goes to investigate. This last bit is the important one, but I quite enjoyed seeing how it all played out so I won't say any more.

Now, if I had been reading this book in print, I have to say I might have given up on it. Most of it is wonderful and up to par with the rest of the series, for sure. But somewhere in the last third of the book, Stroud goes off on what seemed, listening to it, to be a long and tedious tangent about the "Other Place" where demons spend their time when not being enslaved. I was interested to know what it was like, sure, but after just a few sentences of description, I was like, okay, I get it, let's move on? Please? There's also a lot of metaphor and meaning imbued into this Other Place, and I would have at least put the book down and walked away after a few pages of that.

But luckily, I was listening to it at work, which meant I could just ignore the book for a bit and focus on the other tedium around me. :) Then, when the action kicked back in, I was ready to go! Of course, when the end happened, I may have become a bit less productive... I won't say it's an especially good ending, but it was very satisfying. Unlike a few other series I could name...

Recommendation: This series is totally worth your time. Go read it now.

Rating: 8/10 (though the series is a 9 on the whole)

The Golem's Eye, by Jonathan Stroud

Hullo again, Bartimaeus! You are my good friend. Let us hang out.

This book picks up a couple of years after the Amulet Incident, with our hero Nathaniel/John Mandrake using his saving-the-prime-minister karma to move himself up in government. Yes, that's right, our idealistic young magician has grown up into an ambitious but uninspired slightly-less-young magician. I really dislike Nathaniel (pretty sure I'm supposed to, so that's good!).

But! Lucky for me, he breaks his not-summoning-Bartimaeus-anymore promise and my favorite djinni is around to make sarcastic remarks in Nathaniel's direction, which really makes the kid more tolerable. Also interesting, if expected, in this book is the introduction of Kitty Jones, who was in the previous book briefly as a petty magical-stuff thief and returns as a more practiced and awesome magical-stuff thief.

The first part of that last sentence is important; I absolutely loved the first book in this series because it went against every fantasy trope that I anticipated. This book, less so. Lots of fairly obvious things happen, and things that you know are going to be important later are totally important later.

But! I loved the story nonetheless. Kitty's in a group called the Resistance that is made up of non-magicians and is out to undermine the magician ruling class. Nathaniel/Mandrake is charged with stopping the Resistance. Someone else is wreaking major havoc on London and blaming on the Resistance, but Nathaniel's pretty sure it's more sinister than that. And, of course, it is. Love it.

Recommendation: Oh, really, just read this series. Unless you don't like magic or fantasy. No, even if! You might like this!

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Sea of Trolls, by Nancy Farmer

Sooooooooooo. This book. I wanted to like it a lot — there's Norse mythology and bards and Beowulf and a titch of magic and adventures and Adventures and seafaring and it's all fairly exciting. I think I just read this at the wrong time.

See, the book I finished right before this was The Amulet of Samarkand, and part of my fangirl gushing over that book was the way that everything was so opposite of what I expected from a fantasy novel and so dark and intriguing. This book? Exactly what you'd expect of a fantasy novel, not dark, not really terribly intriguing. It's a sort of action book, primarily, and I just wasn't mentally prepared for that.

The story is of a kid called Jack, who becomes apprentice to a bard, which in this world is not just a teller of tales but also a bit of a magician, using the tale-telling business to tap into the... I don't remember... crap... Google says Yggdrasil (pronounced eeg-druh-sill), which is right, but there was another name for it. We see how much attention I paid while listening to this book. Sigh. Anyway, the stories have some magic to them that can have varying effects on the listeners. But that's not really the story. The story is that at some point, the bard to whom Jack is apprenticed is attacked and in the ensuing chaos Jack and his sister get kidnapped and taken aboard a slave trading vessel and eventually gets to a Viking village and then he slights the queen but good and then has to go on an epic quest to fix the slight and then spoiler alert he succeeds and goes home.

So there's a lot of stuff happening here, and it's all quite predictable because you can tell it's meant to be a riff on old Norse mythology and whatnot and according to the internet the print book mentions this explicitly at the end, and also mentions that what I felt was a really horrible sort of throw-away joke at the end was actually kind of the point of the book and wow that is neither in the audiobook nor implied by the text itself.

Taken as a sort of epic poem, the book is pretty good, though it drags in parts. I quite enjoyed the Norse setting that I haven't seen too much of elsewhere, and I enjoyed the humor that Farmer puts into her writing. I had some problems with the aforementioned joke, which almost ruined the book for me (I'm not sure if I would have felt different knowing about it in advance), and with the main female character whose role in the story was apparently to be kind of lame and then blossom into a lamer person. Ugh. There are apparently sequels to this book, even though the book itself can stand alone, but I won't be reading them.

Recommendation: For those interested in a bit of Norse mythology and lore and who like an Adventure.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud

Dude. Why had I never heard of this series until my former supervisor mentioned it to me? Where has Bartimaeus been all my life???

I know what the problem is, actually — this book came out in 2003, which is pretty well smack-dab in the middle of Harry Potter Mania, and therefore I couldn't possibly have heard of it, what with all of the HP fans living in my house at the time. (No joke, the ratio of people in my family to copies owned between us of one HP book from the series is less than one.)

The Amulet of Samarkand is also about magic, you see, except that it is not at all the same as the magic in the HP world. In this world, magicians are almost wholly a terrible people, swooping into big cities and subjugating those without magic powers and assuming a rather Slytherin air toward pretty much everything. But the irony here is that even though the magicians claim to have all of this magic power, what it really is is that they have the power to summon up demons (daemons? I don't know, I listened to this book) that have the actual magical ability, and then the magicians just enslave them for however long they like to do their bidding. That's a lovely thing, isn't it?

So, the conceit is dark and awful and also awesome (in the strict sense of the word, because seriously, wow), and then Stroud goes and upends my fantasy-reading sensibilities by making everything that happens quite un-fantastic. There is no deus ex here; if it looks like things are going to go badly for the protagonist, they will. If it looks like they're going to go reasonably well, they will. So many times while listening to this book I thought, "Oh, now the author will reveal some great and/or terrible secret that retcons everything," because that is my training, but no, all of the crazy twists and turns I invented were totally ignored, because Stroud is a better writer than I.

Oh, what's the story, you say? Well, basically Our Protagonist, Nathaniel, is a magician's apprentice who aspires to greater heights but effs the eff up when he decides to summon a hilarious demon called Bartimaeus to go steal something for him. The stealing goes awry, and then it turns out that what was stolen is WAY more important than imagined, and then of course the stealee is not pleased.

It's a pretty standard plot. But Stroud's writing and Bartimaeus's awesomeness and the consequences that could actually happen to an actual person are the most important bits. Oh, and the audiobook narrator is fantastic. Highly recommended.

Recommendation: Read this if you like fantasy but want a little more realism with your magic.

Rating: 10/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Please Ignore Vera Dietz, by A.S. King

If you know me, you know why I got interested in this book in the first place. :) And then I started seeing rave reviews of it everywhere, which made me want it even more — but so did a lot of people, clearly, because it took forever for this to get to the library for me! Totally worth it.

So our dear Vera is a high-school kid dealing with the fact that her best friend is dead. No, worse, that her best friend ditched her for losers and then up and died. No, worse... well, that would be spoiling it a bit too much.

That's pretty much the whole plot. Girl loses best friend, deals with it, doles out the backstory in bits and pieces. It's a decently compelling plot. But what I liked most about the book was the writing — King knows her way around an amusing sentence and definitely knows her way around an odd tangent. The book is mostly written from Vera's point of view, but every once in a while her dad breaks in, or her dead friend Charlie, or this building called the Pagoda that really doesn't want you throwing paper airplanes. That's littering. Oh, and Vera's dad tosses in a flow chart here and there and seriously, Ken Dietz's Face Your Shit Flow Chart needs to be enlarged and prominently displayed on my wall. Everyone's wall, really.

Recommendation: For fans of the tangent and imperfect/rebellious teenagers.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

Okay, so. We already know that I adore John Green. I laughed and cried through Looking for Alaska, I was delightfully baffled by An Abundance of Katherines and his story in Let it Snow, and Paper Towns had me itching for a road trip.

And then Will Grayson, Will Grayson came out, like, heading toward a YEAR ago, and I didn't read it. I said, "Oh, I should pick that up," but I didn't. Partly it came out right before my YA class so those books took precedence, partly I was worried that I wouldn't like the co-written aspect of the book, but mostly, I was afraid of Tiny Cooper.

See, almost every review I saw of Will Grayson, Will Grayson mentioned this same bit that's right in the beginning of the book: "Tiny Cooper is not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but I believe he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world's gayest person who is really, really large." And I have to give kudos to the awesomeness of the writing there, BUT.

I know Tiny Cooper. I know SEVERAL Tiny Coopers. I have had my fill of Tiny Cooper, he gets annoying after a while. I did not want to have to deal with Tiny Cooper ever again. So I did not pick up this book.

BUT then, I was on the internet and I was reminded of National Alaska Young Day (which is spoilery if you haven't read the book), and I was like, hey, maybe I should re-read Looking for Alaska on NAYD, but I was also at the library and they had a copy of Will Grayson, Will Grayson and so I said, "FINE, fate. I will read this darn book."

And I did. And I LOVED IT. I seriously have not cackled gleefully so many times in such a short span of time, and the book was just perfect and wonderful and definitely what I needed after a holiday season devoid of awesome books.

So forget Tiny Cooper. He's there, certainly, and he's large and homosexual and he has written a large homosexual musical that is all about him and how large and homosexual he is, really. But the book is really actually about the Will Graysons, of which there are two and of which one does not use capitals often and is more accurately a will grayson. Will Grayson is your average high school kid, only slightly more neurotic; will grayson is your average high school kid, only slightly more depressed. Will is actively avoiding relationships, will is in a wonderful online relationship that is about to go all IRL. Neither of these goes quite the way either of them planned it, of course, because that's how life is, and their random meeting at a porn store in Chicago (yes, really) makes things go even slightly crazier.

And so the book is of course about relationships in the romantic sense, but it is also very much about friendships, whether between people who like each other or hate each other or like like each other or tolerate each other. And it's about how those relationships change when circumstances change, and how two people can see the exact same event and interpret it completely differently. And it's also about honesty and how it's an excellent thing when used at the right time and not put off too long, which is the main reason that I want to get everyone I know to read this book.

Also, Tiny Cooper is highly amusing, probably largely (hah) because I don't have to be friends with him. Or pick his nose.

So basically, yes, I still love John Green, and also I may need to go out and get David Levithan's entire backlist because he shares much of Green's writing sensibility, at least in this book. And I know it's premature, but this may be a contender for Best Book I Will Read All Year. True story.

Recommendation: For those who love John Green, and David Levithan, and any of the similar YA writers who are wonderfully sarcastic and biting and amusing but also very spot on about everything.

Rating: 10/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Death Note Vol. 6, by Tsugumi Ohba

Oh. Em. Gee.

This is another of the books I've read recently only because they were due back at the library. After things got very wonky in the last book, I was not sure I was going to like this next one.

But I did.

Things? Still wonky. L still doesn't trust Light, which is as it should be, but now also he's decided to go after Kira whatever the costs while the ex-police guys are like, um, shouldn't we try to stop him killing people even if we can't catch him? So there is a split, and Light gets caught on L's side even though he doesn't like it on account of the handcuffs that keep him attached to L at all times. Oh, and also on account of his girl-thing Misa being really excited about being used as bait to find Kira.

But! While Misa is doing the bait thing, she discovers that in fact she used to be a Kira and that Light was also one (they had made themselves forget this previously), so now she has even more leverage with the new Kira, provided she doesn't slip up in front of the people who want to capture her. Who are also the people she is acting as bait for. And it's all crazy and stuff.

But but! It gets even crazier when the plans start to come together and the new Kira is being chased and herded and almost caught... but then the book ends in a bit of a cliffhanger. And to make things worse, my husband says that what happens next is EVEN MORE INSANE. I am going to have to go track down book 7, like, yesterday. Sigh.

Recommendation: This stuff is insane, yo. Read it if you don't mind your brains EXPLODING EVERYWHERE.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, by Bryan Lee O'Malley

So. The movie version of this series came out a while ago, and I was intrigued but not movie-going-money intrigued, but my brother was like "OMGSCOTTPILGRIM" and so I decided to get the first book and see what it was about. Of course, the queue for it at the library was forever long, so it took me like a month or two to get it, and by then I wasn't really super-interested anymore, but then last week I realized it was due back at the library the day after I looked that information up, so I figured I'd read it.

And boy, am I glad it was short, both because I was able to finish it before it had to go back and because I didn't really like it. Now my brother is going to complain at me.

But... really. There's this kid... well, I say kid, but he's 23 and I'm pretty much that old too, so whatever. This kid, Scott Pilgrim, and he's dating some high-school chick, and he has a band, but then some girl starts entering his dreams, like LITERALLY, and then he meets her and he likes her but he has to fight her evil ex-boyfriends first but that's okay because Scott's the best fighter in Ontario which we find out when he's fighting the first ex and also there's some musical-style choreographed backup dancing fighting something....

That's pretty much the entire story. Sorry for spoiling it for you? But I'm still very very baffled. I think this might actually be something I'd like more if I could watch it. Onto Netflix this movie goes!

Recommendation: Good for people who don't need any of that fancy "logic" stuff interrupting their story. Also people who are rock-band-y nerds, I think.

Rating: 5/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Behemoth, by Scott Westerfeld

I would like to thank my connections at the Twinsburg Public Library for letting me check this book out while I was hanging out at my parents' house for Thanksgiving. This is one of those books that I can't find in Jacksonville, and I really wanted to read it, so it worked out quite well!

This is the sequel to Leviathan, which I read a year ago and loved a lot. To recap the basics, it's the Great War as it would have been fought if only the Axis had giant machines to fight with and the Allies had fabricated animals that did things like fly and poo shrapnel.

Right. In this book, our future archduke becomes a bit of a prisoner of war aboard the Leviathan and decides to escape; our girl-pretending-to-be-a-boy soldier is tasked with a secret mission that works but goes a little bad in that she's now stuck in Istanbul without a quick way back to her ship. Conveniently, his archduke-ness is also hiding in Istanbul, and they meet up again quickly to help some revolutionaries who might be able to help both of their situations.

I was not as excited by Behemoth as by its predecessor. Deryn, the soldier, is no longer as badass as she previously was... I mean, she's still fighting and doing awesome things, but she spends less time being like "I'm awesome and you can't argue with that" and more time mooning over his archduke-ness, Alek. I dislike mooning. I also wasn't as taken with Alek, though I'm not sure why... I guess I just felt that I didn't really know what was going on with him, between his men being deceptive and he being really quite daft.

I will probably read the conclusion to this trilogy, but I won't be waiting as excitedly as I was for this one.

Recommendation: If you liked Leviathan you will want to read this, and I recommend Leviathan to anyone who likes an alternate history or some steampunk.

Rating: 7/10

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Dead-Tossed Waves, by Carrie Ryan

So I kinda sorta rather enjoyed The Forest of Hands and Teeth, to which this book is a companion (not so much sequel). Forest was full of interesting zombies and deep dark secrets and a trial of faith and although I didn't think it a particularly good book, I thought it was very entertaining.

This book... less so. At first I was all excited because the main character here is Gabrielle, not Mary of the first book, and in the first book Gabrielle is the zombie chick that caused a lot of problems. I thought perhaps this was going to be a sort of companion book that talked about Gabrielle's life and how she ended up in Mary's town. Then, crushing disappointment when I found out that the Gabrielle in this book is actually Mary's daughter.

So we have fast-forwarded many years to the future. And nothing much has changed. Mary has settled in by that ocean she had longed for, where Gabrielle — Gabry — has learned all about the Mudo (previously the Unconsecrated) and how lame they are and how they want to nom people. Nonetheless, she sneaks out with a bunch of people to go play in Mudo territory and of course the Mudo attack and Gabry's boy-thing is bited and she runs away and her friends get caught and sentenced to a Really Bad Rest of Their Lives and then Gabry's bff blackmails her into going out to rescue said bff's brother slash Gabry's boy-thing. But of course, this is not very easy, especially when Gabry starts falling in love with another boy.

And that is where I got distinctly displeased with this book. It was like the Hunger Games books all over again, with the indecision and the boys mooning and FOR SERIOUSLY it needs to stop. Bring me more zombies!

But the zombies are mostly lacking in this book, at least until the end when there are a disgustingly large amount of them, and the love story was certainly not as compelling as the deep dark secrets of the first book. Like the Hunger Games before it, I am sure I will read the third novel in this series in the hopes that it will be as awesome as the first book. I hope I'm not disappointed again!

Recommendation: Not for the zombie lover, or those with an allergy to dramaful love stories. At this point, I would definitely stop after The Forest of Hands and Teeth.

Rating: 6/10
(RIP Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Chrisbookarama
Shhh I'm Reading...
Book Addiction
Persnickety Snark
Devourer of Books

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.